a last ‘hurrah!’

This week marked the last in what my friend has termed quite appropriately “the fastest summer ever.” It’s to be expected of the synonymous “last summer ever”, as it precedes my senior (and, barring any major academic catastrophes) and final school year. Graduate school may yet appear on the horizon, but as of now I’m staring down the abyss of post-school life, and it’s filled me with more than a little trepidation, but also a glimpse of readiness and excitement.

Zach came into town from Southampton for a few sundries and we decided to have a really decent meal before we both took our departures from the great city. We went to Cookshop for dinner. Waiting for our table, we had some St. Germaine’s Collinses. After we sat down, we had a carafe of 2000 Bordeaux Sauvignon Blanc (actually the cheapest wine on the list) to wash down the glorious squid and scallop salad and tuna steak. Our digestion was helped along by a glass of 2003 Sauterne. I ordered this wine wholly on account of the fact that it was the first wine my Uncle drank after recovering from throat cancer (yes, it really is that good).

Afterwards, Zach and I hung out in his Uncle’s well-appointed apartment, watching (in steady, unwavering alternation) the new VH1 show “G’s to Gents” (in which, on a play on the time-tested cinderella tale, uncultured and typically Black men compete to affect the greatest transformation of etiquette and diction), and Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim”.

The next day Zach and I had breakfast at Jackson Hole, a local diner, and then set off for the New Museum, located on the Bowery:

courtesy doobybrain.com

The current exhibition, After Nature, was one of the most mindblowing shows I’ve seen in recent memory. If you can afford the trip, it really is a must-see. From Werner Herzog’s apocalyptic interpretation of the future via the images of Kuwait’s burning oil fields after the 1993 war in the Persian gulf in Lektionen in Finsternis to the bizarre and mind-transporting sculptures that are too numerous to name and too profound to attempt to describe, this show really is one of the first truly progressive contemporary art shows I have seen.

After that and before we parted ways Zach and I had an amazing lunch at Cafe Habana, on Elizabeth street, right across the Bowery: